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Confront reality (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

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We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose” If you want to understand experts, you need to start by finding them. So the psychologists who wanted to understand “expert performance” began by testing alleged experts, to see how good they really were. In some fields it was easy: in chess, for example, great players can reliably beat amateurs. But in other fields, it was much, much harder. Take punditry. In his giant 20-year study of expert forecasting, Philip Tetlock found that someone who merely predicted “everything will stay the same” would be right more often than most professional pundits.1 Or take therapy. Numerous studi

Confront reality (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) Raw Thought by Aaron Swartz Confront reality This post is part five of the series Raw Nerve . We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell, “ In Front of Your Nose ” If you want to understand experts

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